Large and mid-sized companies, particularly those in science and technology industries, often have a great need to procure publications relating to the company's research and development efforts. Many of these companies have a large staff or company library dedicated to the identification of documents required by the company's researchers. The effort to obtain the desired documents is often expensive and plagued by a variety of inefficiencies.
A major drawback experienced by the in-house document retrieval model described above is the failure to comply with applicable copyright rights and regulations. Copyright-protected documents require a purchaser of the document to first obtain the appropriate copyright clearance and permissions from the document's publisher.
In conventional arrangements, in-house library services frequently search for and identify desired documents on an ad hoc basis, failing to leverage inherent efficiencies in the copyright clearance and order fulfillment aspects of the process. Often, these types of systems lack a centralized management of documents which allows for the copyright-compliant reprinting of a document when faced with a later request of a previously ordered document.
Furthermore, the in-house staff and related systems are limited in their ability to identify documents which are not maintained in an internal repository and connect with the appropriate publisher or external source of documents.
An additional drawback to the existing ad hoc document management methods and systems present in the prior art is the natural barrier created in the distribution of research and development and technical documents to the researchers and scientists of the company. Specifically, by failing to efficiently track and manage previously requested documents and/or provide access to externally-available documents, the company fails to maximize the flow of information to the R&D staff, thus hampering the company's overall research and development efforts.
A further drawback of existing document management methods and systems is the difficulty for a user to access and retrieve a document, particularly remotely from a mobile device. Frequently, users waste an inordinate amount of time searching for documents that are “hidden” or dispersed in a multiplicity of storage devices. An attempt to overcome this problem is discussed in an article titled “SciVerse: It's Elseveir, Jim, But Not as We Knew It!” by J. Elsevier, published in Insights 7, September 2010. However, the model described in the Elsevier article suffers from a critical shortcoming in that it is subject to and dependent upon the competing interests of publishers who, depending on their size, may or may not welcome the level playing field described by Elsevier.
In addition, companies continually face the challenge of providing easy and secure access to the company's documents to its employees that are working remotely. In this regard, employees are limited to working only within their secure network and not able to work remotely.
The above-described inefficiencies and lack of centralized management of the document control, access and delivery process results in conventional approaches to document management which is expensive to implement and manage. Therefore, there is a need for a method and a system for efficiently and effectively implementing, managing, administering and monitoring a document management and delivery program.